The world has grown accustomed to mobile telephonic devices (MTD) such as cell phones and phone-based Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). These devices function in a wireless network where one or more such devices communicate using voice or data to each other or to external services. Services can include making external phone calls to land-line voice networks, making phone calls to other cell phones, leaving or retrieving voice mail message or exchanging data messages, such as e-mails, text messages, pages and others.
There can be issues with responding to senders of communications to such devices. There is a perception that users of such devices are always accessible and are always connected to emails, voicemails etc. If a sender of an urgent communication is expecting (either rightly or wrongly) an immediate response and if the recipient cannot currently monitor for receipt of such a communication, (e.g. because he is in a meeting), then the recipient will not be able to respond to the sender. Prior art auto-response systems, like “vacation”-type responses for emails provide limited response capabilities and they lack flexibility with the content, format and medium used for the response.
There is a need to address the deficiencies in the prior art.